Original DIY Costume - Post-It Malone Wordplay Costume

I’m always on the lookout for an original DIY costume ideas and I love doing something fun and creative for Halloween. This year I really wanted to mix things up a bit. 2021 produced a fair amount of pop culture references like Squid Game, Bridgerton and the Suez Canal ship (which are all decent material) but after coming across a picture of Post Malone in a Google search one day I thought, “wow…Post is pretty cool and his name rhymes with so many things, so I can really work with this.”

After considering many zany and original DIY costume ideas like Ghost Malone, Goal Post Malone, Toast Malone and Post-It Malone, I figured the latter would be the coolest of the bunch because I could design a giant Post-It that Malone would potentially write himself and then walk around in it with his look.

I did some additional searching to see if anyone had done this sort of thing before and noticed that nobody really had (at least from what I could see), so it was right up my creative alley. It was important to me to not only design a cool post-it for this, but to also recreate Malone’s look as much as I could because his tattoos and accessories are a very distinctive part of his identity. My wife helped me with a lot of the logistics and the overall look and feel of the costume and thankfully we were able to get the job done in a week or so without too many hiccups.

This original DIY costume was really a hit with a lot of the people who saw it and I had a ton of fun wearing it to the NYC Halloween Parade and elsewhere around the city. I was a runner-up in the annual Instructables.com costume contest (my first placement there!) and I also entered this into Webster Hall’s infamous $5,000 prize contest as well, where it drew a pretty good reaction from the crowd.

Steps to make this:

1. Designing the Post-It Note in Photoshop – this was the most fun for me because I love Photoshop and I’m pretty decent at it.

2. Cutting the Bottom of the 36″x36″x12″ Box so that I could walk.

3. Paint the sides and top of the box yellow. Only the sides and top needed this since the front and back would later have posters taped there.

4. Measure and cut the head hole so that I could wear the box on my shoulders.

5. Measure and cut the arm holes on the sides so that they could poke out.

6. Adjust the 3 holes as needed so that the box could rest comfortably on me. I knew I was going to wear this for several hours so this step was important!

7. Secure the Box With Duct Tape – also very important! The last thing anyone wants is their costume coming apart in the middle of a parade.

8. Tape the Photoshopped Posters to the front and back of the box.

9. Apply Tattoos to Face, Neck, Hands and Arms – this took a long time since Post has so many but it was totally worth it! And it’s fun to sport a lot of fake tats.

10. Shape and shave my mustache in half so that it looks like his.

11. Mess up hair and put in a bun

12. Accessorize! I added a plaid shirt, microphone, fake cigarette, chain, gold teeth and extra post-it note stacks to really complete the look.

Overall, a ton of fun!!